Against Stories

There’s a passage in E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel in which he ties himself up into knots on the subject of ‘stories.’ Forster writes:

What does a novel do? If you ask a certain type of man, whom I visualize on a golf course, he will be aggressive and brisk. He will reply, ‘Why tell a story of course, and I’ve no use for it if it didn’t. I like a story to be a story, mind, and my wife’s the same.’ And another man says in a sort of drooping, regretful voice, ‘Yes — oh dear yes — a novel tells a story.’ I detest and fear the first speaker. And the second speaker is myself. I wish it were not so, that the novel could be something different — melody or perception of the truth, not this low atavistic form.

I remember being very perplexed by this the first time I read it. Out of all the problems in the world, this guy had an issue with …. stories? But, now that I’m older and more dyspeptic, I can see what he’s talking about and share much of the same aversion and belief — the idea that, to harness its full potential, literature, actually, has to confidently free itself from the confines of stories.

I’ve come to think of it as a bifurcation in philosophies. Stories align with very deep structures in the human psyche and have fairly narrow, almost-quanifiable rules. They have a beginning, middle, and end, for instance. They have moments of crisis and end in resolution. Maybe most importantly, they exist in a very clear, cordoned-off timeframe — once a story ends, it ends, and it follows from there that a story has its own energy system, which can be optimized, so that everything in the story contributes to everything else like in some perfect, crisply-flowing machine.

It is hard to read, for instance, Joseph Campbell and to not be convinced of the primacy of stories both in shaping the entirety of our worldview and in forming an underlying societal architecture. All stories worth their salt, Campbell contends, are pieces of a single ‘monomyth,’ which can be found in the anthropology of every society you can think of, and which posits the hero leaving home, having a series of initiatory adventures, and then returning to slay his father, marry his mother, bring peace to the kingdom, and, promptly and crucially, to then ‘crucify’ himself.

It is a humdinger of a story, actually, and smart-guy literary analysis is often about teasing that out and, ideally, incorporating it into one’s own screenplay. Star Wars, famously, was written with a copy of The Hero With A Thousand Faces splayed open, and there’s a reason that Star Wars taps into the collective psyche of the 20th and 21st century world more, really, than anything else. The movie-making of the ‘90s, in particular, was, as Charlie Kaufman put it, all about ‘reverse engineering’ films from these underlying archetypes. And the entirety of Freudianism and of modern psychology, which really is the air that we breathe, is of a piece with Campbell’s theories — that there is a path to a healthy psychological development (which has to do with the primal scene, separation from one’s parents, acceptance of one’s mortality, etc) and which is modeled for us in myths and stories.

That school of thought is worthy of respect, of course, but I find it somehow lacking. Simply put, there is a great deal in life that doesn’t line up with the world as it is presented to us in stories. There is dead time, there is feeling lost, there is what I used to think of as the walking-aroundness of life, there are the cycles of sun-up, sun-down, of seasonal renewal, which have only a glancing resemblance to the beginning-middle-and-end of story structures. I felt this strongly in my own life when, very naively, as a teenager, I imagined that the books I read would give me some insight into how the world worked and then discovered in my 20s that that just didn’t really seem to be the case. There seemed to be whole swathes of existence — what it’s like to have a job, how money works, the meandering course of most relationships and friendships — that just somehow didn’t really register in even the very highly-regarded, ostensibly successful stories that I was coming across.

I started finding hints for this different sensibility above all in the stray comments of various jaded writers. Forster complained about the tyranny of stories and clearly seemed to prefer some very different aesthetic. Virginia Woolf wrote of Middlemarch that it was one of the very few books for “grown-up people.” Don DeLillo, in an interview, described himself in his formative writing years as drifting away from anything like the conventional literary scene, as being “a man in a room and feeling that there was something important about a man in a room.” Michel Houellebecq, in his Paris Review interview (one of my favorite pieces of literary criticism ever), said the following of his literary start:

There was only one value — a little reality, man! Show us the real world, the things that are happening now, anchored in the real life of people.

For Houellebecq, that meant a very simple — and surprisingly untrammeled — path to great writing: take the lived-in truths that most people gloss over and write them down. He wanted to write about how a person’s ugliness — not any character failing or anything like that — would entirely exclude them from the dating market, and that became the genesis of Tisserand in Whatever and Bruno in Atomized. He wanted to write about how “entering the work force is like entering the grave….it’s obvious once you say it, but I wanted to say it,” and that became the driving plot line in Whatever — which Houellebecq describes as his concreted effort to make people “care about the lives of computer programmers.” (...)

What that means in practice is an extreme attentiveness to life itself — what’s actually happening in your life, what’s embarrassing, what’s inglorious, what are the sort of things that fall outside of any of the usual narratives of how you would explicate your life and then assuming that that’s where the real truth is. Comedians use these techniques all the time. The premise of stand-up comedy (say the Lous C.K., Doug Stanhope style) is to name the shocking things that everybody recognizes but that nobody has the nerve to say in public themselves. The premise of somebody like Larry David is to focus in on the minutiae of daily life, all the little awkwardness and social faux pas that, taken together, comprise the bulk of how we actually live. But the non-story sensibility does not have to be limited to comedy. It’s the revolution that Chekhov initiated in theater and that continues through naturalism — the most important technique being to slow the tempo of art down to the pace of everyday life (Chekhov’s plays can begin with a card game, with an awkward silence), and, instead of what Annie Baker calls “the breakneck pace” of most plays, to just breathe into the reality that we all have, of being bored, of being anxious, of being trapped in a life that more often than not seems to have no particular in-built story structure to it.

by Sam Kahn, Castalia |  Read more:

Image: Moby Dick, Exeter Bookbinders via:

[ed. See also: Jonathan Franzen's: Mr. Difficult: William Gaddis and the Problem of Hard-to-Read Books (pdf).]

Mouse Movers

Wells Fargo & Co. fired more than a dozen employees last month after investigating claims that they were faking work.

The staffers, all in the firm’s wealth- and investment-management unit, were “discharged after review of allegations involving simulation of keyboard activity creating impression of active work,” according to disclosures filed with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.

“Wells Fargo holds employees to the highest standards and does not tolerate unethical behavior,” a company spokesperson said in a statement. [ed. If only the same could be said about upper management.]

Devices and software to imitate employee activity, sometimes known as “mouse movers” or “mouse jigglers,” took off during the pandemic-spurred work-from-home era, with people swapping tips for using them on social-media sites Reddit and TikTok. Such gadgets are available on Amazon.com for less than $20.

It’s unclear from the FINRA disclosures whether the employees Wells Fargo fired were allegedly faking active work from home. The finance industry was among the most aggressive in ordering workers back to the office as the pandemic waned, though Wells Fargo waited longer than rivals JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Goldman Sachs Group. (...)

The nation’s fourth-largest lender has sought to grow in wealth management under Chief Executive Officer Charlie Scharf and his deputy, Barry Sommers, who joined the firm in 2020. The unit was hit particularly hard by a series of scandals that erupted in 2016, sending advisers fleeing by the thousands, taking lucrative clients with them.

The recent firings have echoes of another episode at Wells Fargo from 2018, when the firm investigated employees in its investment bank for alleged violations of its expense policy after they tried to get the company to pay for ineligible evening meals.

by Hannah Levitt, Bloomberg/Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: Jamsim1975/Wikipedia
[ed. Mouse movers. Huh. Learn something new everyday I guess. What's more depressing is the surveillance culture these cat-and-mouse tactics (sorry) imply.]

Hot Damn

Tesla shareholders have approved a $45bn pay deal for CEO Elon Musk, following a fiercely contested referendum on his leadership.

The result, announced on Thursday, comes as the billionaire tycoon fights to retain the largest-ever compensation package granted to an executive at a US-listed company.

“I just want to start off by saying, hot damn, I love you guys!” a gleeful Musk said as he appeared on stage following the vote.

The vote took place after a Delaware judge nullified Musk’s payment – then worth around $56bn – in January, on the grounds that Tesla’s board could not be considered independent from Musk’s influence and reached that dollar figure through an illegitimate process.

The result is a victory for Musk and the Tesla board after they ardently campaigned for shareholders to approve the deal. It could serve as a rebuttal to the judge’s ruling that struck down the award – making it easier for Tesla’s board to argue that shareholders were properly informed about the payment package, and the board members’ ties to Musk, before casting their votes.

Tesla’s board warned Musk could turn away from the company if the package wasn’t approved, while Musk claimed on Wednesday evening that he had wide support of investors. (...)

The vote does not automatically mean that Musk will receive the money, however, and there are likely to be further disputes. There are still numerous legal arguments around whether the board can be considered independent, and whether the package can be considered fair after the judge ruled otherwise.

It is also possible new lawsuits may arise over the vote, potentially bringing the case back in front of a judge and raising the prospect of a protracted legal battle. Shareholders also approved a measure to move Tesla’s legal home from Delaware to Texas, potentially further complicating any challenges. (...)

Judge Kathaleen McCormick, who oversees Delaware’s court of chancery, ruled that Tesla’s board conducted a “deeply flawed” process to determine Musk’s payment. McCormick found that the board was rife with personal conflicts and stacked with Musk’s close allies, such as his former divorce attorney.

Tesla’s board, which is likely to appeal McCormick’s ruling, sought to remedy her decision with a shareholder vote. Despite McCormick’s criticism of the pay package, the board put forth the same deal that the judge rejected – albeit now worth less money due to a fall in Tesla’s share price.

by Nick Robins-Early, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters
[ed. Exhibit No. 1 in the decline of western civilization. 45 thousand millions. For one person. For Elon Musk. Even if Jesus and Einstein were co-CEOs of Tesla I'd call that an insane compensation package. Any Tesla shareholder who voted in favor of this travesty should forever live in shame. For more background, see also: Tesla leads charge to defend Elon Musk’s $56bn pay package (Guardian).]

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Phil Greenwood, Cregennan Lake
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Phil Greenwood, Daisy Lights
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This guy

Got this girl

Hope springs eternal

[ed. As they say, love is blind. But also, lucky in love, lucky in life.]

Image sources misplaced; Jane Birkin/Serge Gainsbourg

Tom Gauld

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The Teenage Whaler’s Tale

Before his story made the Anchorage paper, before the first death threat arrived from across the world, before his elders began to worry and his mother cried over the things she read on Facebook, Chris Apassingok, age 16, caught a whale.

It happened at the end of April, which for generations has been whaling season in the Siberian Yupik village of Gambell on St. Lawrence Island on the northwest edge of Alaska. More than 30 crews from the community of 700 were trawling the sea for bowhead whales, cetaceans that can grow over 50 feet long, weigh over 50 tons and live more than 100 years. A few animals taken each year bring thousands of pounds of meat to the village, offsetting the impossibly high cost of imported store-bought food.

A hundred years ago — even 20 years ago, when Gambell was an isolated point on the map, protected part of the year by a wall of sea ice — catching the whale would have been a dream accomplishment for a teenage hunter, a sign of Chris’ passage into adulthood and a story that people would tell until he was old. But today, in a world shrunk by social media, where fragments of stories travel like light and there is no protection from anonymous outrage, his achievement has been eclipsed by an endless wave of online harassment. Six weeks after his epic hunt, his mood was dark. He’d quit going to school. His parents, his siblings, everybody worried about him.

In mid-June, as his family crowded into their small kitchen at dinnertime, Chris stood by the stove, eyes on the plate in his hands. Behind him, childhood photographs collaged the wall, basketball games and hunting trip selfies, certificates from school. Lots of village boys are quiet, but Chris is one of the quietest. He usually speaks to elders and other hunters in Yupik. His English sentences come out short and deliberate. His siblings are used to speaking for him.

“I can’t get anything out of him,” his mother said.

His sister, Danielle, 17, heads to University of Alaska Fairbanks in the fall, where she hopes to play basketball. She pulled a square of meat from a pot and set it on a cutting board on the table, slicing it thin with a moon-shaped ulu. Chris drug a piece through a pile of Lawry’s Seasoned Salt and dunked it in soy sauce. Mangtak. Whale. Soul food of the Arctic.

Soon conversation turned, once again, to what happened. It’s hard to escape the story in Chris’ village, or in any village in the region that relies on whaling. People are disturbed by it. It stirs old pain and anxieties about the pressures on rural Alaska. Always, the name Paul Watson is at the center of it.

“We struggle to buy gas, food, they risk their lives out there to feed us, while this Paul Watson will never have to suffer a day in his life,” Susan Apassingok, Chris’ mother, said, voice full of tears. “Why is he going after a child such as my son?” (...)

Alaska Natives have been hunting bowhead in the Western Arctic for at least 2,000 years. The animals were hunted commercially by Yankee whalers from the mid-19th century until the beginning of the 20th century, decimating the population. Since then, whale numbers have recovered, and their population is growing. In 2015, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimated there were 16,000 animals, three times the population in 1985.

Alaska Native communities in the region each take a few whales a year, following a quota system managed by the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission (AEWC). The total annual take is roughly 50 animals, yielding between 600 and 1,000 tons of food, according to the commission.

Subsistence hunting of marine mammals is essential for villages where cash economies are weak. The average household income in Gambell, for example, is $5,000 to $10,000 below the federal poverty level. Kids rely on free breakfast and lunch at school. Families sell walrus ivory carvings and suffer when there isn’t enough walrus.

Store-bought food can be two to three times as expensive as it is in Anchorage, depending on weight. In the village grocery, where shelves are often empty, a bag of Doritos is $11, a large laundry detergent is more than $20, water is more expensive per ounce than soda. No one puts a price on whale, but without it, without walrus, without bearded seal, no one could afford to live here. (...)

Soon Chris had congratulations in his ears and fresh belly meat in his mouth, a sacrament shared by successful hunters on the water as they prayed in thanks to the whale for giving itself. He had been the first to strike the whale, so the hunters decided it belonged to his father’s crew. They would take the head back to the village and let the great cradle of the jawbone cure in the wind outside their house.

They towed the whale in and hauled it ashore using a block and tackle. Women and elders came to the beach to get their share. Every crew got meat. Whale is densely caloric, full of protein, omega-3s and vitamins. People eat it boiled, baked, raw and frozen. Its flavor is mild, marine and herbal like seaweed.

People packed it away in their freezers for special occasions. They carried it with them when they flew out of the village, to Nome and Anchorage and places down south to share with relatives. Everyone told and retold the story of the teenage striker. Then the radio station in Nome picked it up: “Gambell Teenager Leads Successful Whale Hunt, Brings Home 57-Foot Bowhead.” The Alaska Dispatch News, the state’s largest paper, republished that story.

It used to be that rural Alaska communicated mainly by VHF and by listening to messages passed over daily FM radio broadcasts, but now Facebook has become a central platform for communication, plugging many remote communities into the world of comment flame wars, cat memes and reality television celebrity pages.

That is how Paul Watson, an activist and founder of Sea Shepherd, an environmental organization based in Washington, encountered Chris’ story. Watson, an early member of Greenpeace, is famous for taking a hard line against whaling. On the reality television show, Whale Wars on Animal Planet, he confronted Japanese whalers at sea. His social media connections span the globe.

Watson posted the story about Chris on his personal Facebook page, accompanied by a long rant. Chris’ mother may have been the first in the family to see it, she said.

“WTF, You 16-Year Old Murdering Little Bastard!,” Watson’s post read. “… some 16-year old kid is a frigging ‘hero’ for snuffing out the life of this unique self aware, intelligent, social, sentient being, but hey, it’s okay because murdering whales is a part of his culture, part of his tradition. … I don’t give a damn for the bullshit politically correct attitude that certain groups of people have a ‘right’ to murder a whale.” (...)

“This has been my position of 50 years and it will always be my position until the day I die,” he wrote.

Watson and Sea Shepherd declined to be interviewed for this story but sent a statement.

“Paul Watson did not encourage nor request anyone to threaten anyone. Paul Watson also received numerous death threats and hate messages,” it read. “It is our position that the killing of any intelligent, self-aware, sentient cetacean is the equivalent of murder.”

Villagers have been familiar with Watson’s opinions for many years. They have seen him on cable, and many remember 2005, when Sea Shepherd sent out a press release blaming villagers for the deaths of two children in a boating accident during whaling season.

Many environmentalists who object to subsistence whaling have a worldview that sees hunting as optional and recreational, said Jessica Lefevre, an attorney for the whaling commission based in Washington, D.C.

“The NGOs we deal with are ideologically driven; this is what they do, they save stuff. The collateral damage to communities doesn’t factor into their thinking,” she said. “To get them to understand there are people on this planet who remain embedded in the natural world, culturally and by physical and economic necessity, is extremely difficult.”

The organizations are interested in conservation, but fail to take into account that Alaska Natives have a large stake in the whale population being healthy and have never overharvested it, she said. Some NGOs also benefit financially from sensation and outrage, she said, especially in the age of social media.

by Julia O'Malley, High Country News |  Read more:

Image: Chris Apassingok by Ash Adams

[ed. Anti-Social media, continuing its 'service' of providing hateful uninformed assholes a worldwide platform and megaphone. This story recently received the James Beard Media Award, along with those of another Alaskan writer, Laureli Ivanoff of Unalakleet (2 Alaska journalists win James Beard Media Awards) (ADN). Here's one by Laureli: Where the first spring harvest relies on a still-frozen ocean (HCN):]

***

"We both fired at the ugruk sleeping on the ice 100 yards ahead, but the bullets missed their mark. We watched the long gray mammal, heavier than the three of us put together, quickly slip into the hole it had scratched through the ice.

“How’d we miss?” I said as I pulled the gun’s lever to eject the bullet casing, the metal against metal smooth. Arctic did the same without answering my question, knowing I wasn’t looking for an answer.

Arctic is the kind of person you want to have next to you, whatever you’re doing. When he was in high school, he was captain of the Wolfpack — the Unalakleet basketball team — and he led with quiet, assured dignity. Whether the task is to build a chicken coop, butcher a moose or cut salmon for drying, Arctic works from start to finish, cracking subtle jokes along the way. Your stomach relaxes and you breathe deeper when he’s around.

As we put the guns on safety, the ocean water lapped against the sides of the boat, and the cool spring breeze brushed the backs of our bare necks. Dad slowly backed the boat away from the ice pan in case the ugruk popped up close by to breathe after diving. The scent of rotten fish and shrimp filled the air, and Arctic and I looked at one another, smiling. Accusatorily.

“Did you fart?” I asked Arctic.

“Nope,” he said as we got a stronger whiff.

I started laughing, hard. “That ugruk farted on us.”

Sometimes our spring bearded seal hunt happens in April. Usually in May. One year, the ocean ice broke up early and we were boating around ice pans in late March. Each year we wonder if the warming northern oceans will allow us adequate time to hunt for the largest of the seal species that live in the Norton Sound. Ugruk are 7 to 8 feet long and weigh several hundred pounds, and only good thick ice will support them. Some years, the ice melts too quickly, or the currents and winds do not bring thick pans that formed in the outer Bering Sea into the sound, and we have just days to hunt. Each spring, our family works to harvest at least three adult ugruk; the meat we dry and the oil we render feeds us all year long.

Later that day on the boat last spring, Arctic pointed to the big dark head of an ugruk as the animal swam in blue water, each ripple reflecting sunlight, crisp and cheery. Unlike the smaller, curious ringed seals that duck back beneath the surface with hardly a splash, ugruk will dive in, showing their backs and rear flippers. The large seal dove, its curved spine seeming to go on for miles.

“That’s a big ugruk,” Dad said, in awe.

He piloted the boat slowly to where we’d seen the ugruk and pulled the throttle back. The motor idled; the glass-calm water reflected the clouds and bright blue sky, as if to let the earth adore itself after the dark winter. We waited. The rippling ocean waves sparkled and the water lapped against the ice pans. Our rifles in hand, we scanned the water all around us, calm and ready.

Arctic and I looked at one another, this time with wide eyes. We heard it.

The ugruk, beneath us.

Singing.

Hearing an ugruk sing is like hearing the ghost of a beautiful woman wailing, undulating between loud and soft. The song captures the attention of every cell in your body. It sounds haunting, but is nothing like a haunting. Instead of sadness or fear, the song evokes wonder and awe. And thankfulness, for getting a glimpse of the everyday for some beings, something that’s unimaginable, momentous and rare for us, the visitors.

The ocean fell silent. We heard Dad’s motor idling, again the lapping of water against ice and our own slow breathing as we waited. Seconds later, the melody from below, from the water, began again.

Tears in my eyes, trying not to move or make a sound that would startle the seal, I looked at Arctic and smiled. He didn’t smile back, but I knew he was also delighted. Anyone with a pulse would be."

Jean-Luc Godard, self-portrait, 2020
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Wieners

[ed. Glen Powell seems to be having a moment these days (deservedly so) with his new movie Hitman on Netflix. This clip from an earlier time is hilarious and reminds me of a few scenes from Top Gun (with Powell of course reprising Val Kilmer's bad guy role in the sequel Maverick.]

There’s No Such Thing as “Just a Song”

During the early, quiet, and lonely months of the COVID-19 pandemic, many strange things occurred, among them a renewed interest in a near-dead genre of music: sea shanties. It started with one viral video on TikTok and it morphed, as trends do, to include other types of ballads and chants, leaving historians scratching their heads.

“They’re not shanties!” explains maritime music expert Stephen Sanfilippo in exasperation. “Those songs aren’t even work songs”—the type of folk music to which shanties belong.

Sanfilippo discovered the genre in the mid-1970s when, fresh out of the Navy, he started a folk music club at the Long Island high school where he taught. He went looking for old songs from the area; one led to another, and he has dedicated the half-century since then to collecting, performing, analyzing, and teaching songs from the sea.

To him, the songs that briefly went mainstream are more than just fun ditties or old-fashioned novelties. They’re important historic artifacts that give us a glimpse into how people in the past lived, worked, and thought of themselves. “Sometimes my students will say, ‘It’s just a song,’” says Sanfilippo. “But there’s so such thing as ‘just a.’”

The flash-in-the-pan glow of #ShantyTok has faded, but Sanfilippo remains committed to keeping maritime music alive. And though he doesn’t have high hopes for its future, his work can help illuminate the murky waters of contemporary life.

You told me that you’re particularly interested in the “music of the common people.” Work songs fall into this category, but what makes maritime music the music of the people? Why is it worth remembering this music and performing it?

The sort of songs I sing are chanteys: the work songs of seamen. These are maritime songs, work songs, that are used to set the tempo and rhythm of body motion of particular tasks. They are akin to calling cadence when marching, which isn’t done by officers but by privates. It’s done by prison chain gang workers. And it’s not the guards who are singing it; it’s the guys who are swinging the sledgehammer. The songs are coming from the workers.

The ballads about shipwrecks and storms, often you’ll hear poetry critics call them doggerel. They’ll say they are formulaic. Of course they are formulaic! “We had a ship, and a storm at sea, and it was capsized. Thirty-five of us were killed and two survived.” That’s the formula. But when it’s lived experience, you can hear something in it that is eternal.

As a graduate student, your scholarship focused on Marxism and maritime music. What was the connection?

I wanted to do something with folk music and the “plain” people. I was also called to the idea that everything in nature is beautiful, and working in nature creates a body of music. The songs of dock workers, the songs of cowboys, even the songs of coal miners—they’re working in nature, too. They’re underground in the Earth. Doing this kind of labor creates a particular kind of music.

But that connection with Marxism didn’t quite pan out, did it?

The 1840s were a decade of labor radicalism; Europe had 17 revolutions in 1848. They were revolutions of the left against the established power of foreign occupiers, dukes, kings. My great-great-grandfather fought in the 1847 revolution in Germany and when he failed, he fled to New York. This is when Karl Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto. It was the time of Seneca Falls and the women’s movement. Things were happening.

I wanted to see if that kind of class consciousness existed among nautical workers or whalers. So I went to read 80 journals that were written by whaling hands, cabin boys, and ship’s carpenters. These were the guys writing, not the captain. I wanted to show that the seamen in the whale fishery—at least those from eastern Long Island— had a radical sense of class consciousness developing in the 1840s. I thought I would show this through songs.

What I discovered is that none of these songs have a clear sense of class consciousness. There is conflict, but it’s not phrased in terms of class. Even in songs in which they had a poor person, it was describing one poor man in opposition to a single rich man. The stories in the songs weren’t phrased in terms of unified class consciousness. What I found instead is that they presented sailors in terms of their manhood.

In my thesis, I argued that there were several different types of masculinity represented in song. Seamen—by which I mean the hands, not the officers—were very different one from another. I wrote of them as “bourgeois aspirants,” who sought to earn money toward personal financial and status advancement; “secular libertines,” the stereotypical drunken, brawling, whoring sailor; and Evangelical Christians who, in the mid-1800s, were very much involved with social reform movements. They were the “liberals” of the day.

Why do you think sailors were not more radical or concerned with labor issues, given that they were working in a dangerous industry and likely being exploited by wealthier men?

Among other things, because human actions are often irrational. The simple answer is that people don’t really act in their own interest individually—and it’s hard to put thousands of mobile workers together. The geographical mobility of seamen, the going from ship to ship, and the overall impermanence of the work, be it in whaling, fishing, or commercial sailing, worked against the sort of organizing that could go on in mines and factories.

Keep in mind, I am not arguing that seamen were not conscious of being abused, and that they didn’t resist. Many—if not most—were always conscious of physical abuse, bad conditions, bad food, and bad pay, and found ways to resist. What I argue is that they did so through a view of abuse being an affront to their manhood, rather than through class consciousness.

What else do the songs tell us about the singers?

That they are not the stereotype we assign to them. Those who went to sea were diverse in outlooks and sensibilities. The same could be said for those ashore, especially as many of the ballads heard at sea were originally from farms or small towns.

Several times in our conversations you have said, “Everything in nature is beautiful.” How does this belief inform your work as a musician and historian?

“Beauty” doesn’t necessarily mean “pleasant to look at,” although most of “scenic” nature is. Remember, nature has no morality—so when a wolf kills and eats a lamb, or a tsunami kills thousands in a coastal town, or a shark eats the floating survivor of a shipwreck, that’s nature.

My father hated and ridiculed the word “picturesque.” “The picturesque farmers at work in their fields” means the impoverished peasants or serfs or slaves toiling endlessly for the landlords—or lords, or plantation owners. Those landlords don’t live in nature, but live off the toil of those forced to labor in a transformed nature for profit for the owners. But nature, in and of itself, is beautiful. It is God. What isn’t beautiful is the horrors of labor.

I hold that nothing made by man is more beautiful than a full-rigged ship sailing before the wind, the perfect coordination of nature and human mind and skill—but I must also remember that the seamen work in great physical danger, under severely harsh conditions of labor exploitation.

Do you think there’s a place for work songs in contemporary culture?

The roofers were here yesterday. The roofer was in his mid 40s and he had two guys working with him who were 18 or 19. They had two radios. They were listening to what Susan and I would call laundromat music—but they were not singing.

My grandfather and my father and my uncles, they bought abandoned farmland that was redlined for Italian immigrants. They built their houses on it, and while they were doing that, they would sing. They sang while they worked. What I see now with workmen is that they don’t sing. (...)

What do you think is the future of work songs? Do they have a place in the 21st century that’s not just TikTok memes and watered-down, pirate-themed performances?

Let’s say that I’m not optimistic.

If by “work songs” you mean the historic call-and-response form of singing to coordinate body movement and muscle power by setting rhythm and tempo, I honestly see no future other than as something of a fabricated oddity among people who are somewhat “counterculture.” I can’t speak for other societies, but the United States has become a country of listeners who will listen to whatever the commercial music industry tells them to listen to at any given time.

When was the last time you passed a worksite and heard the workmen singing? When was the last time you passed a worksite and heard their radio playing music that had something to do with their work, or with the rhythm and tempo of their work? Music has become detached—or, to use a Marxist term, alienated—from work and from the worker. It’s relegated to background noise. Similarly, when was the last time you were in a store that played music over a PA system and shoppers sang along? Or in a doctor’s waiting room?

by Katy Kelleher, Nautilus |  Read more:

Image: Susan Sanfilippo; George Cruikshank/Wikipedia

Rockin' 1000

[ed. Everybody wants to be a rock star. Unfortunately abbreviated, but more (full tunes) on YouTube here:]

Pain and Suffering

Demonizing opioids has unintended consequences

The first time I saw a dying patient suffer through extreme pain came shortly after I joined a hospice volunteer program in Manhattan. I was assigned to visit Marshall, a former welder, who occupied a double room in an all-HIV facility on Rivington Street on the Lower East Side. Our first visit was quiet. Marshall seemed too demoralized by his condition to entertain a guest, so we watched TV. But when I arrived for our second visit, I found him literally doubled over. He clutched his knees and slightly rocked his body. Marshall’s roommate, Timothy, told me that he had been reprimanded by staff for getting Marshall some Advil when he asked for it. But the medication Marshall was being given for pain by medical staff didn’t last long enough. I hurried down the hall to summon the nurse, who seemed hesitant to respond. She had been instructed to administer pain medication every four hours. Within two hours of dosage, Marshall was experiencing what’s called “breakthrough pain,” and then he was left to withstand that pain for another two hours. What could she do? I protested loudly. Finally, a doctor and a primary nurse came to Marshall’s bedside. One of them suggested giving Marshall a drug they had not yet tried, one with demonstrated efficacy: methadone. The nurse shifted from one foot to the other. “It’s highly addictive,” she said, as if the conversation were over. What possible difference could that make? “He’s dying,” I told them.

This was 2014. Methadone was considered a “junkie drug,” what addicts took to get off heroin—and by this time, heroin use had been rising rapidly. In fact, the United States was in a “third wave” of opioid abuse, which started with widely prescribed painkillers in the late 1990s, then a rise in heroin deaths beginning around 2010, followed by a rise in deaths from illicit opioids such as fentanyl beginning around 2013. By 2014, there were twenty-eight thousand annual drug-overdose deaths in the United States. The widespread awareness of what is often called an “opioid epidemic” explains the nurse’s warning that day about the addictive risks of methadone. There were several obstacles to treating Marshall’s pain, but the greatest was the stigma of opioids.

The stigma is not hard to understand: magazine features, books, and movies for two decades now have chronicled America’s drug problems, including the rapacious role of drug manufacturers like Purdue Pharma, which made OxyContin a household name and enriched the Sackler family in the process. The publicity of their misdeeds led lawmakers on a campaign against opioid prescribing. Yet the crackdown had an unintended consequence, one little examined today: it has increased the suffering of patients who experience chronic pain, as medications that were once heavily promoted have since been restricted. And it has added to the needless agony of those like Marshall at the end of life. I told the story of Marshall and others like him in my 2016 book, The Good Death. Since that time, the double-sided problem has only seemed to worsen. Even morphine, which has long been used to ease the final days and hours of patients in hospice care, is only available to the fortunate ones, as supply chain problems have combined with fears of overuse, leading to vast inequities as to who dies in terrible pain.

This unequal access to pain medications is part of a worldwide problem, stretching far beyond the privileged precincts where hospitals are well-stocked with the latest in medications. Last summer, the World Health Organization released “Left behind in pain,” a report that zeroes in specifically on lack of access to morphine, which it notes is “the most basic requirement for the provision of palliative care.” Worldwide, about half of all deaths each year occur while patients are experiencing “serious health-related suffering,” due to poverty, racial bias, limited access to health care—including palliative care—and laws that restrict opioid distribution.

International respondents to the WHO survey pointed to policies or laws that “overly focused on preventing illicit use and unduly restrictive administrative requirements for prescribing or dispensing morphine.” One survey respondent noted, “The regulatory controls are so many that the pharmaceutical industry doesn’t find [morphine] worth manufacturing as the profit is low and regulation is high. The regulators are more concerned about misuse than easing the pain of patients.” (...)

Inaccurate understanding of morphine’s properties is common around the world. Sixty-two percent of the respondents from the Americas believed that morphine was only “suitable for use in people near the end of life.” Such “negative attitudes and perceptions” regarding morphine and other opioids suggest a misunderstanding of how addiction works and how the medical profession should balance the benefits of opioid use for pain with the dangers of powerful drugs. These negative attitudes include “associating opioid use with imminent death” and believing “that opioids can immediately and definitely cause dependence and that opioids are always harmful or even lethal.”

Today there are more than five hundred drugs that are derived directly or synthetically from opium, a product of the poppy plant. They are used to treat a vast range of ailments including congestion or cough, post-surgery pain, chronic pain, addiction, and end-of-life pain. “Opium and its derivatives are all things to all men and have been so for centuries,” Martin Booth wrote in his 1999 book, Opium: A History. Today, not just in the United States but around the world, opium and its derivatives are part of two huge markets, delivered either by the pharmaceutical industry or the illicit drug trade. And perhaps more than ever before, the extraordinary power of opium products to alleviate pain is complicated by the language of addiction.

The Power of Myth 

Some addiction experts offer a counternarrative about today’s much-discussed opioid crisis. In the late 1990s, there was a movement in the medical community to better address the pain that patients were experiencing, especially in the final weeks of life. With roots in the palliative care movement, which began with the establishment of hospice programs in the UK in the 1960s and the United States in the 1970s, this focus on pain relief emphasized better training for medical professionals: fear of addiction and biases within medicine were preventing doctors from prescribing adequate pain medication, even to those who were dying. But soon, at intake, patients were being asked what level of pain they were experiencing on a scale of one to ten, or to identify themselves on simple diagrams of faces ranging from a frown to a smile. And savvy pharmaceutical manufacturers rushed to develop medications that could supposedly treat pain without the addictive aspects.

OxyContin was patented in 1996 and aggressively marketed to doctors and the public, along with other new opioid drugs. This resulted in a surge of prescriptions, sometimes in large quantities. About two-thirds of those prescriptions were never fully used, so the country’s medicine cabinets were suddenly awash in prescription pills. These pills were often found by curious teenagers or family members, those experimenting with drug use, or those with prior drug experience. “Prescribing increased massively, and a lot of that increase did not go to people with pain,” Maia Szalavitz, author of Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction, told me. “If they were so horribly addictive,” Szalavitz said of those unused prescriptions, “how could this even be true?” In other words, the majority of those with legitimate prescriptions were not getting hooked. And as many as 80 percent of those using prescription opioids for a high were not getting them from a doctor.

Demand created a market: pill mills. Those dependent on opioids sought out their own prescriptions, while others began to sell their unused pills for extra income. Instead of addressing drug use with treatment—methadone, buprenorphine, abstinence programs—states and the federal government began to respond by limiting the quantity of opioids that doctors could prescribe, hurting legitimate pain patients, who were now unable to get the medication that allowed them to function, and leaving those dependent on or addicted to illicit prescription medication in deep withdrawal.

“Do you really think that’s not going to generate a local street market?” Szalavitz asked. So, in “towns where there was deindustrialization, a lot of despair, long family histories of addiction to things like alcohol,” she said, people were forced to find a new drug source. Heroin and street fentanyl filled the void. Those addicted to or dependent on prescription opioids were now using drugs that were not commercially made, their dosages variable, unpredictable, and often deadly. Between 2011 and 2020, there was roughly a 60 percent decline in opioid prescriptions in the United States. Yet, the overall overdose death rate per capita, across all drug categories, tripled.

This way of looking at the opioid crisis is worlds away from the prevailing narrative that Big Pharma alone was driving up the overdose death rate. Pharmaceutical companies were indeed pocketing billions of dollars. Yet, taking down Purdue Pharma didn’t solve the opioid problem. No laws were passed to change marketing practices, and little effort was made to support those with addiction through treatment and training, or through economic policies and health care access. And hardly any attention was devoted to the people with pain who now had to struggle to find medications that had previously allowed them to live their lives.

When I asked Szalavitz how she made sense of this misleading popular narrative about addiction and overdose, she told me, “You couldn’t say that the people who got addicted to prescription opioids were starting by recreational use because then white people wouldn’t be innocent—and journalists like innocent victims. We had to get it wrong in order to convict the drug companies.” From this vantage point, every story of, say, a high school athlete getting hooked on Oxy after knee surgery is misleading as an average portrait, defying both the data and what experts know about addiction. Most people with addiction begin drug use in their teens or twenties, which means it’s likely that those proverbial student athletes getting hooked on Oxy were already experimenting with drugs. “If you don’t start any addiction during that time in your life, your odds of becoming addicted are really low,” Szalavitz told me. “So, what are we doing? We’re cutting off middle-aged women with no history of addiction, who are not likely to ever develop it, and have severe chronic pain, to prevent eighteen-year-old boys from doing drugs that they’re going to get on the street instead.”

Understanding—and addressing—addiction is what’s missing from current drug policy. Instead, some types of drug dependence are demonized, dependence is conflated with addiction, and the best, most cost-effective treatment for pain to exist at this time is stigmatized and kept from those who rely on it to function. As Szalavitz explains it, dependence is needing an increasing dose of a drug to function normally. Many on antidepressants or other stabilizing drugs are not shamed for their dependency. Addiction, Szalavitz says, is using a drug for emotional not physical pain; it is “compulsive drug use despite negative consequences, so increasing negative consequences does not help, by definition.”

Truly facing and addressing addiction requires a new vocabulary—and accepting that “say no to drugs” is an inadequate response. It also requires an examination of far-reaching economic and social challenges in our culture: lives of despair, racial prejudice, economic insecurity, isolation, inaccessible health care, expanding police forces and prisons, and, of course, politics. For politicians, “drugs are a great way to get elected,” Szalavitz said. They can campaign on tough drug laws, claiming that their policies will decrease overdose deaths. “It’s really infuriating,” she told me, “because our prejudice against pain and our stereotypes about addiction push us toward solutions to the problem of opioids that simply do not work.” (...)

Today we call the extensive family of opium-derived drugs opioids, but the term obscures the difference between opiates, the alkaloids extracted from the poppy plant or derived from it—morphine, codeine, heroin—and opioids, the more than five hundred drugs fully or partially synthesized from chemical components of opium. The partially synthesized include hydrocodone (Vicodin), hydromorphone (Dilaudid), and oxycodone (OxyContin, Percocet). The fully synthesized include dextromethorphan (NyQuil, Robitussin, Theraflu, Vicks), dextropropoxyphene (Darvocet-N, Darvon), methadone (Dolophine), meperidine (Demerol), and the infamous fentanyl (Sublimaze, Duragesic). The catchall term, then, is a linguistic manifestation of the way that addiction has colored our understanding of an entire class of drugs, some of which remain medically indispensable.

by Ann Neumann, Baffler |  Read more:

Image: Valeria Biasin

[ed. Exactly. I've been banging on this issue for ages saying exactly the same thing (just type the term opioid into the 'Search' button). When a few pill mills and unscrupulous doctors were initially exposed you could see the hysteria coming from a mile away.]

Is Silicon Valley Building Universe 25?

Back in groovy 1968, visionaries dreamed of a utopia of peace and love. But only one person actually created it.

I’m referring to John B. Calhoun, a scientist who built a perfect society in a small town in Maryland. He created an actual Garden of Eden in modern America.

But only for mice.

Even today, Dr. Calhoun’s bold experiment—known as Universe 25—demands our attention. In fact, we need to study Universe 25 far more carefully today, because zealous tech accelerationists—that’s now a word, by the way—aim to create something comparable for human beings.

What would you do if AI took care of all your needs?

Would you be happier? Would you be kinder and gentler? Would you love your neighbor more? Would you spend more time with family? Would you have a richer, more fulfilled life?

Calhoun tried to answer that question by creating a utopia for mice, and watching how their society evolved when all their needs and desires were met.

It didn’t turn out like he planned.

Calhoun started with eight mice—and he gave them a perfect environment. His specially designed mouse utopia offered unlimited food and drink, cozy apartments for nesting, ample supplies of nesting material, and constant temperature control to maximize comfort.

There were no predators. There was no disease. There was no competition. There were no threats.

Mice were free to be the best they could be. The only thing missing was 24/7 Netflix.

There was just one rule: Nobody could leave.

The galvanized metal walls of Universe 25 had no exit doors. But why would a mouse want to move out of the Garden of Eden?

Calhoun expected that his mice would flourish and propagate. He had room for 3,000 mice in his pen. He anticipated that the population would soon reach that limit.

It never happened.

At first, the population doubled every 55 days. But things started to deteriorate after the mouse population reached 620—although that was only around 20% of Universe 25’s capacity.

The problem started in the northeast corner of the pen, where the birth rate dropped enormously. But the decline soon spread elsewhere.

Dominant males adopted a narcissistic lifestyle—cleaning and preening themselves, and gorging on food. But they lost interest in routine mating behavior, although rape of both males and females was now on the rise.

Many other males became listless. Calhoun shared some details:

They became very inactive and aggregated in large pools near the centre of the floor of the universe. From this point on they no longer initiated interaction with their established associates, nor did their behaviour elicit attack by territorial males. Even so, they became characterized by many wounds and much scar tissue as a result of attacks by other withdrawn males.

Females now became very aggressive—attacking each other, and even their own children. Males no longer acted as protectors, losing interest in defending the nests. Yet they would increasingly attack other mice for no purpose. Although ample food was available, mouse-on-mouse cannibalism was now commonplace.

The mouse population stopped growing on day 560. A few baby mice survived weaning for several more weeks—but after day 600 not a single newborn mouse lived to adulthood. (...)

The last living mice in Universe 25 were totally anti-social. They had been raised without maternal affection and nurturing, and grew up in a society of extreme narcissism, random violence, and disengagement.

Eventually the entire mouse population in Universe 25 died out. They couldn’t survive utopia. (...)

***

AI is ramping up to displace doctors, nurses, lawyers, teachers, software developers, engineers, scientists, therapists, writers, musicians, artists…all the way down to customer service reps, fast food workers, and the lowest entry-level employees.

Nobody is immune. Well, almost nobody.

Except for a few overlords, everybody else with a social purpose or meaningful vocation will be disrupted. And not because consumers want this—surveys show the exact opposite.

Consumers hate AI replacement theory by an overwhelming majority. But the ruling technocrats want it madly. And will force it upon us—as quickly and as irrevocably as possible.

But what happens to a society where people are deprived of purposes and vocations?

Humans are so much more complicated than mice. So if mice need challenges and obstacles in order to flourish, we need them all the more. People are not built for passive lives—and the tech billionaires who are chasing this (out of greed, not benevolence) are courting disaster on the largest scale imaginable.

More than 100 years ago, sociologist Emile Durkheim studied the problem of anomie. That’s not a word you hear very often nowadays. But we need to bring it back.

Anomie is a sense that life has no purpose or meaning. The people who suffer from it are listless, disconnected, and prone to mental illnesses of various sorts. Durkheim believed, for example, that suicide was frequently caused by anomie.

But the most shocking part of Durkheim’s analysis was his view that anomie increased when social norms were lessened. You might think that people rejoice when rules and regulations get eliminated. But Durkheim believed the exact opposite.

When the old structures go away, people encounter a crisis of meaning in their lives. In extreme cases, they kill themselves.

by Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker |  Read more:

Images: John Calhoun and Universe 25; Twitter/X

Is Microsoft Trying To Commit Suicide?

The breaking tech news this year has been the pervasive spread of "AI" (or rather, statistical modeling based on hidden layer neural networks) into everything. It's the latest hype bubble now that Cryptocurrencies are no longer the freshest sucker-bait in town, and the media (who these days are mostly stenographers recycling press releases) are screaming at every business in tech to add AI to their product.

Well, Apple and Intel and Microsoft were already in there, but evidently they weren't in there enough, so now we're into the silly season with Microsoft's announcement of CoPilot plus Recall, the product nobody wanted.

CoPilot+ is Microsoft's LLM-based add-on for Windows, sort of like 2000's Clippy the Talking Paperclip only with added hallucinations. Clippy was rule-based: a huge bundle of IF ... THEN statements hooked together like a 1980s Expert System to help users accomplish what Microsoft believed to be common tasks, but which turned out to be irritatingly unlike anything actual humans wanted to accomplish. Because CoPilot+ is purportedly trained on what users actually do, it looked plausible to someone in marketing at Microsoft that it could deliver on "help the users get stuff done". Unfortunately, human beings assume that LLMs are sentient and understand the questions they're asked, rather than being unthinking statistical models that cough up the highest probability answer-shaped object generated in response to any prompt, regardless of whether it's a truthful answer or not.

Anyway, CoPilot+ is also a play by Microsoft to sell Windows on ARM. Microsoft don't want to be entirely dependent on Intel, especially as Intel's share of the global microprocessor market is rapidly shrinking, so they've been trying to boost Windows on ARM to orbital velocity for a decade now. The new CoPilot+ branded PCs going on sale later this month are marketed as being suitable for AI (spot the sucker-bait there?) and have powerful new ARM processors from Qualcomm, which are pitched as "Macbook Air killers", largely because they're playing catch-up with Apple's M-series ARM-based processors in terms of processing power per watt and having an on-device coprocessor optimized for training neural networks.

Having built the hardware and the operating system Microsoft faces the inevitable question, why would a customer want this stuff? And being Microsoft, they took the first answer that bubbled up from their in-company echo chamber and pitched it at the market as a forced update to Windows 11. And the internet promptly exploded.

First, a word about Apple. Apple have been quietly adding AI features to macOS and iOS for the past several years. In fact, they got serious about AI in 2015, and every Apple Silicon processor they've released since 2016 has had a neural engine (an AI coprocessor) on board. Now that the older phones and laptops are hitting end of life, the most recent operating system releases are rolling out AI-based features. For example, there's on-device OCR for text embedded in any image. There's a language translation service for the OCR output, too. I can point my phone at a brochure or menu in a language I can't read, activate the camera, and immediately read a surprisingly good translation: this is an actually useful feature of AI. (The ability to tag all the photos in my Photos library with the names of people present in them, and to search for people, is likewise moderately useful: the jury is still out on the pet recognition, though.) So the Apple roll-out of AI has so far been uneventful and unobjectionable, with a focus on identifying things people want to do and making them easier.

Microsoft Recall is not that. (...)

And there are tools already out there to slurp through the database and see what's in it, such as TotalRecall.

Surprise! It turns out that the unencrypted database and the stored images may contain your user credentials and passwords. And other stuff. Got a porn habit? Congratulations, anyone with access to your user account can see what you've been seeing. Use a password manager like 1Password? Sorry, your 1Password passwords are probably visible via Recall, now.

Now, "unencrypted" is relative; the database is stored on a filesystem which should be encrypted using Microsoft's BitLocker. But anyone with credentials for your Microsoft account can decrypt it and poke around. Indeed, anyone with access to your PC, unlocked, has your entire world at their fingertips.

But this is an utter privacy shit-show. Victims of domestic abuse are at risk of their abuser trawling their PC for any signs that they're looking for help. Anyone who's fallen for a scam that gave criminals access to their PC is also completely at risk.

Worse: even if you don't use Recall, if you send an email or instant message to someone else who does then it will be OCRd and indexed via Recall: and preserved for posterity.
Now imagine the shit-show when this goes corporate.

And it turns out that Microsoft is pushing this feature into the latest update of Windows 11 for all compatible hardware and making it impossible to remove or disable, because that tactic has worked so well for them in the past at driving the uptake of new technologies that Microsoft wanted its ~~customers~~ victims to start using. Like, oh, Microsoft Internet Explorer back in 2001, and remember how well that worked out for them.

Suddenly every PC becomes a target for Discovery during legal proceedings. Lawyers can subpoena your Recall database and search it, no longer being limited to email but being able to search for terms that came up in Teams or Slack or Signal messages, and potentially verbally via Zoom or Skype if speech-to-text is included in Recall data.

It's a shit-show for any organization that handles medical records or has a duty of legal confidentiality; indeed, for any business that has to comply with GDPR (how does Recall handle the Right to be Forgotten? In a word: badly), or HIPAA in the US. This misfeature contravenes privacy law throughout the EU (and in the UK), and in healthcare organizations everywhere which has a medical right to privacy. About the only people whose privacy it doesn't infringe are the Hollywood studios and Netflix, which tells you something about the state of things.

by Charles Stross, Charlie's Diary |  Read more:

Image: Android Authority via:

[ed. This feature can apparently be turned off after installation but how many will do that, especially if it's not obvious what the implications are, or how to do it? Privacy creep is another concern as MS could, over time, try to access a treasure trove of data for AI training purposes. One of my favorite Charlie Stross quotes (actually a quote of a quote) is: "... if we built houses the way we build software, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization." See also this previous post: How Microsoft Plans to Squeeze Cash Out of AI (DS). UPDATE: Oops. Sounds like MS is already backpedalling on Recall. (Ars Technica):]

"On Friday, Microsoft announced major changes to its upcoming Recall feature after overwhelming criticism from security researchers, the press, and its users. Microsoft is turning Recall off by default when users set up PCs that are compatible with the feature, and it's adding additional authentication and encryption that will make it harder to access another user's Recall data on the same PC."

Crying Wolf in an Age of Alarms

In rural Washington, on a dry July morning in 2020, Collienne Becker stood at the edge of her driveway and prepared to face a wall of water.

Minutes earlier, she’d stepped onto the porch of her farmhouse to smoke a cigarette when she heard a familiar, jolting sound. Every Wednesday at noon for as long as anyone in the town of Carnation could remember, a high-pitched siren had blared in the small city, followed by a weekly dose of reassurance over a loudspeaker: “This is a test of the Tolt Dam Warning System.”

For decades, the City of Seattle has owned and operated, from afar, the Tolt Reservoir and Dams, which supplies about a third of greater Seattle’s drinking water. Carnation—a small farming community of just over 2,000 people in the Snoqualmie Valley, about 30 miles east of the city—receives none of that water, but bears all of the risk of the operation. In the improbable event that the 200-foot-high dam fails, a 30-foot wave of water could surge down the South Fork Tolt River and inundate this small town.

Since the time they’re children, locals learn that an alarm on Wednesday at noon is nothing to worry about: It’s just routine testing—everything is fine. But if the siren sounds at any other time during the week, it’s reason to head for higher ground immediately.

This time, it was a Tuesday. A message over the alarm’s accompanying speaker confirmed everyone’s fears: “The Tolt Dam has failed. Evacuate the area immediately.”

Becker, who had recently retired from Amazon, and her husband, Michael, scrambled to grab food and water and leashes for their howling golden retrievers. Yet, by the time they corralled the animals into their Toyota 4Runner, the typically vacant road abutting their property was already bumper-to-bumper. Roaring fire trucks had alerted families to scoop up their kids. They had an hour, tops, to leave town or climb to a higher elevation.

With most of the traffic heading west, away from the reported deluge, Becker decided, somewhat counterintuitively, to drive east toward the dam. The couple had friends who lived in the thickly forested highlands nearby. They could hole up there, potentially. But she only made it a mile. A woman driving a horse trailer had jackknifed across the narrow country road and gotten stuck, blocking it for everyone, after a passerby said a bridge nearby had breached and she needed to turn around.

So Becker doubled back, illegally driving westbound in the empty eastbound lane, incredulous that people were still waiting for the traffic light in the other lane when they could potentially drown at any moment. When she reached home, she walked down her driveway, and, with traffic westbound out of town at a standstill, decided to await her fate. She imagined their farmhouse, one of the oldest structures in the area, getting swept away. She imagined worse. I’m going to die, she thought.

“That’s when a guy said, ‘Oh, it’s all false. Don’t worry about it,’” says Becker. As she stood immobilized in her driveway, he leaned from his car and told her he’d seen a Facebook post that suggested the siren was a false alarm. Becker wasn’t sure whether to trust him, but a sheriff soon came by and confirmed the rumor. A crew working on the warning system had accidentally set it off. Everyone could go home.

The siren, which blared for more than 40 minutes, was the first and most harrowing of eight false alarms that sounded over a four-year span in Carnation. These repeated false alarms left residents with lingering stress, anxiety, and jangled nerves. 

In August 2023, after the sixth failure of the alarm, the city declared a state of emergency, imploring Seattle officials to fix the problem. “Seattle’s dam puts all of our lives and property at risk,” Jim Ribail, Carnation’s mayor, told Seattle City Council that September. But even as Seattle Public Utilities has worked to improve the faulty warning system with new technology and equipment, they can’t alleviate the psychological toll it has already taken. “There are many people that live here today that still suffer from the PTSD [of] this first event,” Ribail said during a community forum later that month.

In the aftermath, some locals have taken measures to protect their mental health. One resident on the autism spectrum sets a timer for two minutes before the test siren on Wednesdays to mitigate his agitation. Becker, meanwhile, leaves town entirely on Wednesdays—every Wednesday. Once a standard, if still jarring, interjection in the quiet rhythm of the town, the siren is now “a trigger,” she says—an anxiety-inducing reminder of that awful day.

Beyond the haunting psychological effects, however, a more insidious and potentially damaging response to the spate of false alarms has also set in across Carnation: There have been so many false alarms, Becker says, that she and others are experiencing “the ‘cry wolf’ thing.” She says, “If it had went off today, I would have probably had that rush of panic, but I would have waited to try to figure out whether it was real or not. Waiting is probably not the right decision, but I just don’t trust it anymore.”

She’s not the only one. Each time the alarm sounded in Carnation, Ribail hopped in his truck and drove up to a 20-acre evacuation site in the Tolt Highlands. Each time, the mayor has waited for his constituents to join him there, only to discover “nobody’s coming up,” he says. (...)

Natural disaster alerting systems are generally more accurate than they once were but remain fallible, so those designing new systems have to ask themselves: What are the consequences of too many alarms versus too few? How frequently and under what circumstances should an alarm go off? And how can we protect these systems from embarrassing hacks, such as the one that occurred in Texas in 2021, in which subscribers received three alerts that killer doll Chucky was on the loose?

In our era of climate change, “having warnings that actually make people evacuate becomes more and more important,” says Katharina Hembach-Stunden, a researcher who worked on a recent study of the cry wolf effect while at Osnabrück University in Germany. “If you have too many false alarms, there’s a lot of research that hints toward people becoming more reluctant to actually respond to it. So you’ve run this risk of them not evacuating and then having higher losses—deaths.” Changing behavior is difficult, she says. (...)

Surveys of more than 4,000 southeastern United States residents discovered that people are very bad at estimating how often an alarm is false and that, even in areas with high numbers of false alarms, residents still sought shelter at among the highest rates.

“There’s mixed findings in that research, which is what makes it so interesting,” says Sarah DeYoung, a professor in the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center who was not part of the NOAA study. “In some communities, it’s led to hyper vigilance. In some communities or instances in some studies, it’s led to reduced vigilance.” (...)

Since 2012, various U.S. government authorities have sent tens of thousands of text message-like Wireless Emergency Alerts to inform different areas of crises such as missing children and severe weather. But at 8:08 a.m. on Jan. 13, 2018, residents of Hawaii received one unlike any before or since: “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”

It would be another 38 minutes before the government sent another alert with the professional equivalent of “just kidding.” Like in Carnation, a local agency was responsible for accidentally activating a false alarm.

Before the follow-up message, confusion reigned on the state’s constellation of islands. Locals wondered whether they were about to endure another Pearl Harbor. Some assumed it had been sent in error. Others called loved ones, thinking they were about to die, and desperately sought more information. A few were more fatalistic, wandering to the beach to drink wine.

These responses, and the aftermath show the wide variety of ways humans may react to the same incident. In a follow-up study in International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, for example, at least one survey respondent reported he could never trust the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency again, while others said they’d be more prepared to take precautions for the next missile alert. (...)

Sharing information with others nearby to better understand a threat and its potential implications—also known as “milling”—was a common reaction in Hawaii, too, the survey found. Neighbors there conferred in driveways and messaged online, suggesting that before people decide to react to an alarm, they may consult others in the community rather than just rely on independent judgment. “I’ve noticed, across all my research and in my personal life, people do that social milling thing, where they’re going to look to see what other people are doing,” says DeYoung, who was one of the authors of the Hawaii paper.

Those who went online usually found reassurance sooner. Some saw posts by Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard that dispelled the missile myth. But others bemoaned the lack of physical cues around them. “A lot of people talked about listening for or noticing a lack of air raid sirens,” says Jennifer Trivedi, an assistant professor in the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center who conducted interviews on the ground after the false missile alert.

A similar complaint would resurface five years later, after the Maui wildfires. The island has 80 siren towers—when natural disaster is imminent, they’re designed to blast long tones to let the public know to seek more information on radio or television and to evacuate to higher ground, head inland, or if they are inside a concrete building, to climb to the fourth floor or higher. The sirens are tested routinely, each month. But during the blazes, officials decided not to activate them at all—in part, for fear that residents would head into the hills, putting them at greater risk. Instead, they sent out only phone notifications. But many people never received these digital alerts, inviting a different but nagging question: How can we manage—and measure the efficacy of—alarms in an era of increased natural disasters if some people never hear the cry?

The roots of that question date back to the 1960s. At the time, scholars David Green and John Swets had just formulated what is known as signal detection theory, which proposed a framework for how people respond to stimuli, or signals—such as disasters—in situations of uncertainty. If they perceive a signal—say, a flood—but don’t get an alarm, it’s a “miss.” If they get an alarm, but no flood occurs, it’s a false alarm. Neither is a desired outcome, but which is worse over the long run?

by Benjamin Cassidy, Nautilus |  Read more:

Image: Ian Dewar Photography/Shutterstock; markk

[ed. I was there (during the incoming missle threat in Hawaii) and most people just seemed sort of nonplussed and confused. Like, how could this be true? And, if it was, what could anyone do? There were no emergency sirens. Later we heard stories about a few people crawling into culverts and such, but mostly everybody just kind of hung around outside - 'milling' as it were - talking to neighbors and just going..."did you get this weird notice thing too?"]

Tom Penaguin

Typewriter in D minor

Lori Hersberger (Swiss, 1964), Today / Tomorrow, 2007
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[ed. See also: Deco Japan, Shaping Art and Culture, 1920-1945 (SAM). Highly recommended.]